SANS 10400 · National Building Regulations
Find the problems
before the council does.
Upload your drawings and get a clause-by-clause check against SANS 10400 in minutes — so non-compliances surface on your screen, not in a rejection letter six weeks later.
Every rejection costs a revision cycle
The expensive part of a non-compliance is not fixing it. It is the weeks spent waiting to be told about it — then waiting again after the resubmission.
Finding out at the council
Finding out before you submit
Illustrative — turnaround varies by municipality and project
Two stages, one read of the drawings
Read the plans
Your drawings go to Claude once, and the facts of the building come back: occupancy class, storeys, wall and roof construction, glazing areas, energy measures.
Check each part
For every SANS part you select, the relevant clauses are retrieved and checked against those facts — producing a finding with reasoning, evidence and a recommendation.
It tells you what it could not read
Where the drawings do not show enough to decide a clause, the answer is “needs more information” — never a guessed pass. On a real building, a false all-clear is far more damaging than an unnecessary question.
What a finding looks like
Total glazing is about 14.6% of net floor area, above the 15% threshold once the west-facing weighting is applied.
Glazing totals 41.5 m² against 284 m² net floor area, which is 14.6% unweighted and therefore inside the headline limit. The west elevation's 9.2 m² attracts an orientation weighting, and once applied the weighted total exceeds the permitted maximum. No compensating measure is shown.
Recommendation
Either reduce the west-facing glazing, add external shading to the west elevation, or commission a rational design assessment demonstrating whole-envelope compliance.
Every finding cites the clause it came from and the sheet it read the evidence off, so it can be checked rather than taken on trust.
Or just ask Claude
Connect Claude Desktop, Claude Code or claude.ai and work in plain language: search the regulations, start a run, read back the failures — without opening the site.
# in Claude
“show me the failing findings
on the Kloof Road house”
Where this stops
Findings are advisory.They shorten the time a professional spends finding problems. They do not certify compliance, and they do not replace a competent person’s sign-off or municipal approval.
SANS 10400 is SABS copyright. Short excerpts are shown for context only. Licensed copies come from store.sabs.co.za.
Your drawings leave the building.Plans are stored on this server and sent to Anthropic’s API to be read. Worth stating in your client agreements.